names for what binds us
by pococurantism
Summary: sometimes you wonder how someone so young can appear to be older than the world itself. spencer/toby.


There are moments that fill you with sadness, the painful awareness of being completely alone; an aching in your heart against the deception of the world itself―the way Aria tucks your hair behind your ear and comments how weary you look, or how your own sister sat at in the corner of the couch looking into the vast expanse of nothing (dreaming of a world where her own family is perfect), a dark winter night with nothing but the cold of the snow sinking into your bones, how his fingers ghost through your hair on an early morning, braiding it as he whispers a poem you are both familiar with, _"Où tout n'est qu'or, acier, lumière et diamants. Resplendit à jamais, comme un astre inutile. La froide majesté de la femme stérile..."_ And the only images running through your mind are the whispers of those words, broken by his pleads of love, and how all you could do was turn away and pretend that the heartbreak he is facing is unreal.

Even now, all of those moments still exist; all of them haunting you in the quiet of your room. Outside, your sister ambles her way to the empty barn, before pausing to look over her shoulder at you. Even in the darkness, you can feel her icy glare, knowing that―if given the chance―she could even freeze Hell itself over with that glare. All you can do is look back at her, not quite knowing what expression is written on your face (you would guess sympathy masked by weariness), but she seems to care nothing of your own thoughts and feelings as she finishes edging her away across the yard.

Turning to reach for your coat, you idly wonder what it would be like to run away from it all. All the things that restrain you (your surname being the biggest) keep you from letting it become nothing more than a daydream in the confines of your mind―a daydream full of warm, blue skies, fingers laced together, and the hollow cry of a seagull overhead. Where you are no longer hiding in fear, wallowing in a paranoid frenzy, trapped and unable to move from your corner, biting words to keep away the vulnerability of what may come, and breaking the heart of the only other person who ever understood who you are, inside and out. All of it is nothing more but words and images in your mind, connecting the axis of the Earth into one.

As you slide your coat on, tugging at the ends of leather gloves, you remember it is precisely five-hundred-sixty-three steps to his porch, and that the words of his comfort ring true. _If you ever get the urge to run away again _(clear as day, the words enter her mind like a knife breaking the skin) _call me first, okay?_ Would those words still matter now? You wonder, but the hardest thing for you to do is to apologize for your own mistakes―because not even you can swallow your pride and let yourself be vulnerable, as much as you would like to.

Even so, you find yourself counting the steps as you walk down the sidewalk, the cool autumn night leaving you feeling melancholic. The smell of fallen leaves and a warm fire sweep you up in a memory you can't quite recall, but you're sure that you can remember the echo of your sister's laugh, and the echo of your own. The darkness ahead of you extends into a never ending road, as you find yourself walking into the stomach of a monster, ready to let it devour you until you are nothing but the dust of crushed bones.

Before you know it, you are standing across the street from his house. The light is on in the living room of the window and it makes you sick to think that perhaps she had used his vulnerability against him, to guilt him into what he was trying to escape all this time. Your stomach twists just thinking of it―how it is all your fault. You are about to turn back, knowing that you can't―won't―apologize, because it was something you had to do. It makes more sense in your mind than you assume it does in his―hurting him for the sake of _saving _him―but it had to be done.

As you begin to turn back, the creak of the front door stops you, the lights from the house illuminating behind. All you can do is freeze in your spot (and hope that it is not him), but you recognize his silhouette, his stance, you've remembered every part of him that you can't even begin to assume that it is someone else. The door shuts behind him as he lowers his head, each step on the porch he climbs down as if it was a mountain, (he looks you worn out to you, so much older) and as he is gathering the keys in his hands, he looks up.

They say when a human sneezes, everything in your body stops for only that moment. Right now, you are sure that even your own heart is not beating, that your lungs suddenly have incapability of breathing, not even the blood in your veins seems to be circulating the way it is supposed to. Here is where you find yourself: hands in your pockets, across the street from the house of the only person you have every truly loved (him, with one foot on the bottom step and the other on the concrete ground), any vocabulary you have ever poured over, recited, written, gone from your memory.

"Every time I cross a street, I feel like I'm disappearing," you say. You know he will understand, that when you handed him that book you understood completely of who he is, not who you thought him to be. The words are the only things that come to your mind. _Disparaître._ For all the eloquent thoughts that lay in the confines of your soul, all of the words you piece together to make a hymn to life, they have all left you alone. Just as everyone else has.

He finally settles his other foot on the concrete, the gentle sound of his keys in his hands being placed into his pockets, as he watches your for a moment. In all your nervousness, all your neuroticism, you fight the urge to bite your lip, or wring your hands, because you are sure that he can read the expression on your face well enough, but you cannot fight back his mask of indifference; that's what leaves you hovering in the threshes of insecurity.

He does not look at you like your sister did―as if you are a monster, a wolf in sheep's clothing ready to devour whoever may pass your way next, a disappointment. From across the street, he reaches out his hand, urging you to cross it, to disappear from everything for just a little while, to become nothing more, but words on pages of the philosophies of mankind itself.

As you let yourself step off that curve, hesitating for only a split-second, you let yourself become nothing more but the wind.


End file.
